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TAPs: Monitor your fiber network, maintain signal performance

TAPs can be a far better way to monitor the multitude of data that travels across your network every second. Amphenol Telect launched a passive monitoring platform that will change the way you think about network security and cable management.

Trouble is, every device we add to the network drags down latency and increases our risk of network outage. Those are the serious problems you can encounter by opting for SPAN ports.

Switched port analyzer (SPAN) ports have done us well in lower-density environments. SPAN ports make a mirrored copy the data on your network, making a copy of the packets travelling from one port to another.

But they fall down in some areas, sometimes creating duplicate packets, capturing incorrect data or missing data altogether.

TAPs, on the other hand, pass traffic from the live network to the monitoring devices, providing a demarcation between the two points. They pass all the traffic between the two points, never disrupting that connection.

TAPs are non-intrusive, undetectable on the network and pass through traffic if the TAP device fails. They:

Monitor full duplex 1G links — no dropped packets

Maintain priority as network bandwidth increases — does not use CPU from active equipment